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Comment by commandlinefan | Hacker News Reader

When Edward Snowden “revealed” that the NSA had been spying on us for decades, I was shocked that anybody was shocked. After all, we’ve known that for a long time - people had been SAYING that for a long time. I realized after the Snowden leaks that most people actually thought they were joking when they said that the NSA was spying on all of us: “har har, as if that could ever happen”. It’s become increasingly clear that I’m not just being paranoid when I believe that they _are_ spying on us, and disposing of the ones who become a problem.

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While I agree, I think it’s worth teasing apart the “They” in this line of thinking. The conspiracy/Illuminati narratives imply a singular, unified cabal of power, which is a very difficult thing to achieve. But I think is more likely, is a loosely coupled system of mutual benefit with many players and imperfect knowledge, but all of whom are incentivized to (or selected for) not rocking the boat too much.

Elizabeth Warren’s quote comes to mind: “The first rule of DC is that insiders don’t criticize other insiders.” I suspect the kernel of truth to conspiracy theories is that various private cabals, from fraternities to Skull & Bones to Bilderberg, act as trust and secrecy filters, selecting for those who know where their bread is buttered, and therefore can be trusted by various elites, who have common interests despite being in direct competition for power, influence, and resources (“honor among thieves”). There need not be a singular group of robed masterminds; just the amorally ambitious pursuing their own interests.

In the case of Epstein, it appears that NY Dept of Corrections and the coroner must both be colluding to make the suicide narrative plausible.

There must be some level of coordinated pressure exerted on both of these offices for neither to highlight the inconsistencies.

What would be more concerning: a governmental agency or a non-governmental organization having this kind of power?

When two Saudi teenagers were found bound together in the Hudson had their deaths ruled a suicide, my confidence in the integrity NYC coroners office died.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/two-saudi-sisters-found-dead-i...

https://www.cnn.com/2018/11/03/us/saudi-sisters-hudson-river...

Classifying obvious murders as suicide often happens if intelligence services have a stake in the investigation. That doesn't mean they want to bury the case. They could try to do an investigation above the "pay grade" of the local cops who otherwise would have a mandate.

Well, they were apparently being abused by their family, had applied unsuccessfully for asylum, and were (or thought they were) about to be deported to Saudi Arabia. They had told people that they would kill themselves if they were forced to go back. They had spent weeks maxing out their credit cards staying in luxury hotels and shopping. They had run out of money the day before they died, and were seen hours before their bodies were found at a park on the bank of the river praying. Also they weren't bound in any way that would have caused them to drown - they had apparently taped themselves together, possibly to keep their bodies from floating apart.

I mean, it's possible that they were murdered. But it's not unreasonable to conclude from the available facts that it was suicide. Do you have access to additional facts that would dispute that conclusion?

Or it's just incentives: if they rule the case is a suicide, it's closed and they can move on with their lives, while if they rule it's a homicide, it opens up a whole criminal investigation and media circus, they'll have a lot of attention on them, they'll have to testify at the trial, there are potential career repercussions if they're wrong (i.e. no conviction), there are potential personal repercussions if they're right and various powerful people would like to see that fact buried, etc. If there's any ambiguity at all, better just lie low and go with the conclusion that means the least work and risk.

HN tends to attract people who believe in finding the Truth with a capital T, but the majority of the world does not function like that. Most people are more concerned about personal costs and benefits and how a given action will affect them. The abstract Truth out there is immaterial; they just don't care, and save their energy for things that matter more to them. Explains a lot about the media, politics, corporate scandals, and so on.

"What would be more concerning: a governmental agency or a non-governmental organization having this kind of power?"

If there is such a organisation, then it certainly would be not either private or government, but both connected.

This is the crux of it; inevitably, government institutions and individuals in important positions are perfectly capable of quietly trading favors and taking action off-books. And in the other direction, private citizens and groups can have pressure applied on them, directly or indirectly, by mechanisms of government.

No, it doesn't - it was a federal prison and the NY DoC has nothing to do with it. And no, even if you buy into the idea that he was killed, there is no collusion needed to make it a plausible narrative, you just have to have the strangulation done competently enough to look like hanging.

So, I was one of the people who read a lot about purported state surveillance before Snowden, and was still "shocked" by what he revealed. It's simple really: while Slashdot commenters et al had been murmuring about Echelon and the NSA for years already, there was no evidence, and therefore no way to sort out the fantasy from the reality.

The shocking part was (a) that the reality turned out to be even more pervasive than the fantasy in some respects; (b) that the details had remained a secret for so long (which is a surprising counterpoint to the whole "governments aren't good at keeping secrets" thing); (c) that it was leaked at all given the first two points; and (d) that any backlash against it all was so milquetoast.

All of this shifted some pretty fundamental stuff in my worldview and the way I regard conspiracy theories. I'm still skeptical of them, by default, but now only because I think that's a necessary blockade against insanity, not because widespread government secret-keeping is implausible.

> It's simple really: while Slashdot commenters et al had been murmuring about Echelon and the NSA for years already, there was no evidence.

Does the European Parliament's 2000 ECHELON report not count? I would say that there was plenty of evidence around, but the attacks of September 11 simply obscured the prior debates about telecommunications privacy in press coverage.

'Spying' suggests something much more targeted than across-the-board data collection. The odds that the NSA keeps track of everyone's online footprint to a large extent is high. The odds that anyone is singled out for close personal scrutiny are very low.

Of course the former makes the latter trivially easy to do, but privacy advocates have failed in two ways: bridging that cognitive gap between passive and active surveillance, and explaining why/how government can reasonably be expected to have worse capabilities than exist in the private sector.

We certainly need stronger privacy laws, but the solution is not for everyone to become a security expert or accept total compromise. That just leads to neighborhoods where every house is barricaded like a prison and the main profit makers are security firms and locksmiths, a condition which already afflicts us: http://tuvalu.santafe.edu/~bowles/GarrisonAmerica2007.pdf

I think the trick with social progress is not in getting people to be aware of a shocking problem, any shocking problem, it's what to do with that energy once it exists.

Which is why Greanpeace and PETA are a joke, but the Nature Conservancy, EFF, and the ASPCA are less so.

Almost anyone can learn to piss people off. We often call them 'assholes'. Turning that energy to something requires leadership.

People who thought this were widely scorned as “conspiracy theorists”.

Too many "conspiracy theories" have come out as true lately.

The latest was the satanic child abuse thing from the 80s that was just un-debunked from the Finders release.

We have have reached the point where it's worth looking at the "debunked" conspiracy theories with a new, critical eye.. which is all kinds of disturbing.

I pay close attention to the "nutters" and "conspiracy theorists". A great way to hide something big in plain sight is to let someone that is unstable see 1/8th of your secret. They will conflate other things into it and sound totally loony, thus invalidating any discussion about your evil plans by anyone, as they will be associated with the unstable person.

I am not going to name names, as that would be inappropriate, but there are some popular public figures that make video and news streams, that have sounded totally loony for decades and yet, turned out to be mostly right or in some cases, spot on. They just conveyed the message poorly.

Which would be why the CIA under Johnson came up with the idea. Keep all the undesirable thought together and let it eat itself getting stranger and less palatable all the way.

> I was shocked that anybody was shocked.

I agree, and I also think that's why there's no widespread outcry about surveillance among the general population. For example a lot of baby boomers grew up with "party line" telephones. I did, rural areas in the 80's still had them. You get used to idea of someone listening. I'm not saying this makes it right, just that it could explain the ambivalence of many.

every time people get mad (not shocked) about some action, there is a guy posting on the internet expressing how dumb we are for being shocked.

Not only disposing of those individuals who become a problem.

Disposing of entire groups and social movements. Example, occupy wallstreet.

As in, stealing, literal, bloody, stealing of an entire generations wealth, and transfering it to those who cause poverty and suffering... and yeah, all the masses can do is "well at least I got a new shiny iphone".

Wake up people, you americans especially are living in worse conditions than people under Stalin lived. Thats not a joke or har har, hard reality.

>Wake up people, you americans especially are living in worse conditions than people under Stalin lived. Thats not a joke or har har, hard reality.

Stalin committed literal genocide of millions of people. That simply does not happen in the USA today and conflating the two weakens any point you may have had.

Please don't use HN for flamewar. It's off topic here and we ban accounts that do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Please don't use HN for flamewar. It's off topic here and we ban accounts that do it.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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